From: Pit Capitain <pit@...>
Date: 2007-01-31T20:34:25+09:00
Subject: Re: testing local vars and exceptions

Raymond O'connor schrieb:
> I'm new to testing, so my apologies if this is really basic, but is
> there anyway to test the value of a local variable in my unit tests?  So
> far I've been making everything instance vars that don't really need to
> be, so I can see their value in my unit tests.

I have never needed to test local variables. Can you give an example why 
you would like to do this?

> Also, one of my methods calls another method in a 3rd party library that
> could throw an exception if there's no network connection.  My method
> has some special logic in it to handle this exception.  I would like to
> test this in a unit test for the method but I can't figure out how to
> throw this exception since its raised in a method I don't have control
> over.  I guess I could put a  'raise exception if test' in my method but
> that doesn't seem right.  Is there any better way to test this?

Test doubles. See 
http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/mocksArentStubs.html for an 
explanation. There are some Ruby frameworks you can use. Look for "mock" 
on http://rubyforge.org.

Regards,
Pit